The device arrived yesterday any I was nicely surprised by it’s design because it looks much better than in the description and comes in a nice and solid box too. So I started with experimenting.

When I connected it to Windows PC, it was detected and the driver was installed automatically. The device was installed as HID so I know that a half of the work is done already because of the HID class there was no need for driver in Linux too. This also reminded me that my previous project USB phone worked on similar principle so there must be a way…

After installing control software from enclosed CD, a new icon appeared in traybar and I was able to take control of a mouse (connected to the switch) by clicking on “Switch”.
One LED on the switch turned off and the other lit up (the device has HW switches built-in under the light so you can switch manually too) and the mouse started working. Nice!

I found out that the switch most probably contains some controller which presents itself as HID. This controller is presented only to PC which currently doesn’t have the target device connected. When you request to connect the target device, the HID controller disconnects and connects to the other PC, while the target device disconnects from the other PC and connects to yours. After that, you are not able to release the device back to the other PC but I don’t mind that. So you always have only one of the two devices connected.

After successful test, I started SnoopyPro. The device id is 1a86:e040, so i started sniffing. After starting the control software, there was a ton of messages transmitted each second, but fortunately they were identical until clicking on “Switch”. After that a final message was sent and the HID device has disconnected.